Muttersprache

At times my childhood might seem fantastic and dwarf-like to most people who would bother to read those musings that serious philosophers and men of letters are able to recollect only in their latter days when the shadows that those citron-resembling smiles produce on one's body as though it were bending a branch from the sickly tree in which our life's stakes rest peacefully waiting for a saviour of sorts.

For that very reason I hold myself from writing about my upbringing, but not only; I also harvest a fear that I will follow the clean path of Rilke and Nietzsche in finding my own life's pivoting point only in order to see it waft and disappear in a blueing-like motion almost vertically, in the same way that one addresses prayers to God that are meant to remain unanswered for one's own good sake.

I cannot remember that well details from those days, at least those that I would like to retell simply because they lack that vantage point in one's redeemed life-picture and because they're so close home that in order to tell them again I would have to invent them as to make them readable in some way; therefore I dwell on those theoretical assumptions that come with the philosopher's withdrawing from the world... it turns my own childhood into a functionalist picture in which only the details have learnt to count for themselves, whereas the persons of flesh and bone remain hidden in the coffins of everyday life, puncturing my letter-box with unanswered musings about days never old, never by-gone.

Rimbaud for one finished writing his whole oeuvre at the age of seventeen, but I am unfortunately condemned to a different type of modern imagination in which the language is unable to describe any reality that is possible in the world; that is why I have to continue writing and following Schlegel in that life is writing itself, as though its only purpose was to furnish the writer's vice with evidence of his own miscarriages and a natural drive to lament his fate without the slightest desire to mend anything; for a Jew it is called "witnessing".

It is also difficult when you have murdered the mother tongue for good and you are left with nothing but crosswords that at times provide some clumsy information about your life, it lacks the depth and the pathos that is necessary not only for writing but for philosophy and for authenticity, even for a truely honest morality preposterously indicating one's choice of himself as a human person with all what this can mean post factum. With the mother tongue not only the life experience commits suicide but also the people that have furnished your life with language and events of any kind; you disappear as a person, as a subject, and despite yourself cross over the lines.

One cannot really know what it means but you are left with the feeling that you have lost something irreparably and you prepare yourself existentially to face the consequences; you hide yourself behind a mask that contains places and people that fade away as easily as they come in, untimely but betraying visitors, commodities, solitudes in the choir of one another. Yet this abscence is always pulling you back to a "Gestalt" of your own humanity that is unreachable because it does not expressly exist in worldly forms, it is merely a musing lost in between reading rooms, baskets of assorted biscuits, cigarettes and second hand newspapers. It is like when you cut out newspaper articles to adorn a wall and upon your return from a long journey you can no longer relate to the good tidings they purport to offer you. It is a calm abandonment from which there is no release but death, yet you do not crave for this sweet companion but wage a war, "γιγαντομαχια περι τους ουσιας" to use the Platonic Heideggerianism that gathers the question of being - "A battle of titans concerning being".

Sometimes with the glimpse of an eye you seem to retrieve those stories as to compose a mythology of your own life and then a theology; but it is not possible, you are not surfacing an age-old problem and soon return to those wishes, kernel of your worldliness, built artifacts and thingly sensations. Only in imaginary flights and dettachments you find that warm space to create worlds and really be like God. You always feel a little funny, because the foreign language always sounds a little cold and even ungrammatical sometimes. It fails to portray you unless you are erudite enough to lose yourself amidst the oceans of quotations and perplexities that only distance and exclude what you want to say, it never replaces it, there is no obliteration.

You speak to your father on the phone and the words seem to transform themselves into perfect verses in the foreign language, into Greek wisdom, virtues, values. It is all what you can read in books, you can imagine, you can invent, but never retrieve. It resembles that Chinese woman who grew up in a Communist country and upon her immigration to America while still a young woman became a prolific writer in the foreign language. Everything was a mistranslation of life, except the longing... because when the language only inflicts you with the severity of pain, as an artist you can only seek refuge in the tongue of the "other"; it is always easier to speak, to pain, to pour your feelings as though they had been raining over the camp of the foreign army for so long that they can only grow used to fetch them sentences as to make some sense of them.

This speechlessness is so impossible "eo ipse" that you can only turn to philosophy, no matter what your age is, once you have discovered the problem at stake there is no solution you can provide, you can at most tend to your discovery with compassion and be a witness, even of your own childhood being written anew in a foreign language as though it were the story of a boy somewhere in Amsterdam or New York.

At times you also retrieve friends from old but yet they can only be remembered in the foreign language and just as easily forgotten. You look at yourself with the despise of oblivion and sometimes this becomes a very sophisticated form of hate, some constant run-away from everyday's language into a palace of delicate phrasings and city-lights that can encompass you all despite the inaccuracy, impossibility, indefiniteness, of the foreign tongue. But I guess that as long as this remains so, one should never keep himself from writing, perhaps one day the poem will sound slightly better, it will sound natural, it will sound yours.

Oftentimes nonetheless this is not befitting either, there are personal crimes too, and misendeavours, things you would like to forget, to keep in one hand for a second or two just to feel it afresh, you want to draw imaginary landscapes to wear yourself inside them. Sometimes as a schoolboy, sometimes as a table or as one of those happy moments in which love and the mother tongue will become one, or already became. It is not so for me, I do remember all the grammar rules and some of the books that gave me away to philosophy, to Plato and to Hoelderlin. Yet for many a year I spoke to my father in the foreign language and composed letters to my aunt, who could hardly read it, this was highly impersonal.

Even the first love, under the bridge and the rain drops reciting "Heidelberg" even when I had never been there at the time, remembering proses in the ancient tongues and expressing words of love in that foreign tongue. This makes the whole affair to look a little empty and funny. I could have loved my father or my mother or my first lover much more so, but the German language and the English language prevented it. I tried to atone with some Greek lines, but it did not work either, it turned my earliest loves into dense prosaic statements that did not lose sight of earthly live, of cotidianity, but never reached it either.

I might have deeply loved my friend Mario, who did not speak any of the foreign tongues and whose clear sensibility threw me outright into the mother tongue. Him perhaps I miss, and this I say in a grammar that sounds tired, weary from the Latin and evocating an old sentence from Goethe. In fact it seems to me that unless I discard the language altogether I shall never be able to write letters with love to my friends and others; perhaps one can compose books and rhymes, but letters? diaries? I don't know. I for example shall never be able to tell my parents of my appreciation or even my hatred, things in the foreign language sounds like a shopping list for a hotel lobby, whereas my sentences in the native tongue are seemly feigned and just as "touristical" as the foreign ones.

Once when I was 14 I met Giorgia while we both stood to smoke a cigarette and I told her I had always wanted to learn Greek, but my first Greek lesson was not in the mother tongue or in Greek itself; it had been in German:

Hast du Verstand und ein Herz, so zeige nur eines von beiden,
Beides verdammen sie dir, zeigest du beides zugleich.

Yes. A poem of Hoelderlin. Even Jaspers wrote to Hannah Arendt when she journeyed to Greece that it was the homeland after all, and I do not know how late I heard that but it seemed to encapsule my experience of the earliest years. The ability to scream outloud my own experience had been taken away, I could not scream because I did not know what I was, what I had been.... otherwise if I knew that I would not need to write. There was no relief at the time but there was consolation; that was so much more important. "Die Schwer gefaßte Entschluß", of Beethoven, even though I had learnt this from Kundera and even so years before I encountered Kierkegaard. I had made existential choices, but so unknowingly that I could tell how daunting they would become.

I never really like the mythologies and the stories of heroes and sagas, but I loved the Greek poetry, and then the tales of saints and their deeds, I loved their lack of wisdom. More than anything else I loved the Greek poems in German. It constituted back then an existential solution for my speechlessness... I lied to my parents and wore a school uniform but all what I did during my day hours was learning Greek and then in the evenings to look for friends who liked poetry. Once my Latin teacher wanted to speak with me, and she made the signals from above inside her office through the window, but that was perhaps the last time I saw her. I left and went to learn Greek, like an adult poet. It was at the time the most important knowledge in the world, the most important thing that a man had to know, but I had little discipline, so for some eight years already I am still learning Greek. But the Greek is not useful to read Greek poetry, it is only meaningful to read German poetry and to be Christian, yet the former is not mine and the latter I am not.

Those little poems contained all the drama in the world, and per force of necessity were also very religious, so religious that I could ponder them over for a whole day; yet this was very difficult without Till. There was also Cecilia and even Liad, but they both spoke to me in the mother tongue and this had little meaning for me. The ship of Hellada had already left, back to Lower Saxony and I would never find this boat but several years ahead; when the Greek poetry had become too sad and the man with too much self-security to read poetry again. I am particularly fond of remembering those about Greece and also about Heidelberg, oh! an Diotima! The first philosopher! Now I've been reading Rilke for a while, in a language that is yet not mine. It is the pivoting point... in which you search for yourself only in order to run the risk of losing it. But this somehow else reminds me of Nietzsche in that there's always a war going on somewhere, there's never peace and Kant was allegedly wrong together with all the pietists, rationalists and positivists. There's always a war going on where, the world is never peaceful, there's always a war with somebody, inside somebody... so that boredom like technology, will not take over. In the meantime the mother tongue remains lost, between Jerusalem, Heidelberg and Bogota. Eveline might have got it right (united in memory, that's how she and me might be, if I dare to describe this all), in our generation all thought is only translation or an attempt at it, this is what Rosenzweig taught. Bonhoeffer spoke once about the difference between emigration and exile, and by having said that I could say that there're no guilty characters here for it was an entirely personal choice, at least in my case. And as far as the German goes, who if not Hannah Arendt to write to Jaspers about it in 1948 "Aber wie Juden sind nicht oder nicht mehr Exilantedn und haben zu solchen Traeumen schwer ein Recht", at about the same time she composed in her diary a poem based on some lines of Rilke that read "Wohl dem, der keine Heimat hat, er sieht sie noch in Traumen".

This poem I knew by heart at the age of 14, this was all the Greek I knew at the time:

Da ich ein Knabe war,
Rettet' ein Gott mich oft
Vom Geschrei und der Rute der Menschen,
Da spielt ich sicher und gut
Mit den Blumen des Hains,
Und die Lüftchen des Himmels
Spielten mit mir.

Und wie du das Herz
Der Pflanzen erfreust,
Wenn sie entgegen dir
Die zarten Arme strecken,

So hast du mein Herz erfreut,
Vater Helios ! und, wie Endymion,
War ich dein Liebling,
Heilige Luna !

Oh all ihr treuen
Freundlichen Götter !
Daß ihr wüßtet,
Wie euch meine Seele geliebt !

Zwar damals rief ich noch nicht
Euch mit Namen, auch ihr
Nanntet mich nie, wie die Menschen sich nennen
Als kennten sie sich.

Doch kannt ich euch besser,
Als ich je die Menschen gekannt,
Ich verstand die Stille des Aethers,
Der Menschen Worte verstand ich nie.

Mich erzog der Wohllaut
Des säuselnden Hains
Und lieben lernt ich
Unter den Blumen.

Im Arme der Götter wuchs ich groß.

Eight years later I seem to know little more about that language, and even less about myself. But at least I do want to understand and to be able to gather some compassion. That is perhaps what I often spoke about philosophy's "love's work". I only study philosophy because I want to learn how to write letters, to write about the first fourteen years of my life, before I had become a person and a Greek at that, way before being or becoming Jewish held but little meaning for me. But all life is indeed becoming, "Queastio Mihi Factus Sum" said Augustine, "I've become a question to myself".

"Through rememberance man discovers this two-fold "before" of human existence... This is the reason why the return to one's origin (redire ad creatorem) can at the same time be understood as an anticipating reference to one's end". (Hannah Arendt on Augustine).

This could perhaps mean I shall not feel anytime soon that I am reaching my harbor and my memories can live for a little longer as to make sense of their own phrasings. Life is always becoming, that is why I shall leave these memories for a while now with a slight optimism about that tongue, in between Heidelberg and Jerusalem, these days. "Alle Freiheit liegt in diesem Anfangkoennen beschlossen". (Arendt)

Brief Lecture

Dear Sirs
German Christian-Jewish Association
Forum on Politics & Society
Dr. Rev. Petra Heldt

The Spell of Plato

To Eveline Goodman-Thau

"fuer alle nicht im Exil und nicht zuhause"

The Spell of Plato is one of those famous kernels of social theory brought to us by Karl Popper in his book "The Open Society and Its Enemies"; the spell of Plato is a call for a democratic world summoning Socratic discussions and their interlocutors, which has been the occidental tradition of politics for nearly twenty-five centuries. The fact that I've been kindly invited by the Theological Research Fraternity in Israel, gives me some hope that the spell of Plato still holds true for many of us but by no means all. Somehow else the American novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in the 1960's that this philosophizing had a very tyrannical and non-democratic nature for whenever you teach or even speak philosophy you are already preaching a common world; not the common world of senses and bodily experience but a common world in which the philosopher conducts experiments: his mind. It becomes problematic though, when philosophy turns into a cult with initiates and followers as it was the case with Neo-Platonism.

Hannah Arendt would have said this is the tyrannical aspect of reason that had been ever-present in political philosophy and any sort of instruction that calls us "to do the right thing". The trial of Socrates might have been indeed one of the most important political events for the 20th century; blind adherence to the laws of the state to safeguard democracy and the Polis from the abyss of mythologies and pre-rational storytelling, it was Jaspers who remarked only after the screen of mist of pre-rational thought had dissipated we could do philosophy with Plato and since Plato. Political philosophies are indeed moral philosophies and limited spherical ethics attempting to tackle the age-old problem of human duality between thought and action; some of these philosophies might speak about the state, the citizen, denizen or even about the human personality.

Nonetheless as far as we have lived in a world that Rosenzweig would call "post-Hegel natum" our philosophies might never again aim at completeness or at reason as the only source of our morality of whichever kind it might be. We can only attempt our best at providing descriptions for some of the worldly artifacts of importance second to none and only then achieve at a system that embraces it all; this has become barely possible in a world that houses as many artifacts as it does ideas and dwellers. Perhaps a thorough understanding of the world had been available to the Jewish sages and also to some of the Church fathers only on account that the world was ever-so-great and indestructible; a certain Lutheran hymn of epiphany speaks about that "world that Christian or unchristian is so totally indestructible". Not so in 2006.

The world of today has become increasingly small yet impossible to capsule, an entropy of knowledge, information and individual reasoning from which one could find anything resembling truth or real presences from old sentences, it is all a matter of the most meaningful representations and projections; not of the most truthful images. This is the legacy of Modernity. Even when this could only narrowly apply to Western men and women of the contingent kind, those who by applying to themselves Apollo's dictum "know thyself" are rather implying a "choose yourself". In choosing yourself you create a paradox because choosing becomes the only way to become what you really are, how can you choose yourself then? These are the men I would like to address tonight, irrespective of Judaism despite Christianity or Christianity qua Judaism.

As a Jew it is notwithstanding puzzling to be summoned to speak in Jerusalem from all places about the rise of political Neo-Nazism in the Federal Republic of Germany; country I do not live in, am not a national of and to which I am only related by accidents of fate, intellect and emotions. I am not a historian of political ideas or a political scientist therefore I shall not dare to address poignant questions on the political life of the young German republic yet old, but will limit myself to speak about the topic I know best and in which I regard myself to contribute in a very personal way: The Structures of Modernity. In this spirit I will adopt a universal perspective with a faith of the sociological kind with little to do with the world of Jewish and Christian world-views yet I will humanly resign myself to dwell on the tension between my universal ideas and my particularity as a "mens generis" as you can see, a Jew as you well know and as an outsider to both the English and the German language as you can no doubt hear. This poignant distinction I owe to a philosopher I will return to many times in the course of this presentation.

Let me start speaking about the Modern world: We all know what this is but few of us have asked the question of what it implicates; the modern world is one and the only of all possible worlds based entirely on freedom yet this freedom cannot become a foundation for anything since it shares a sense of emptiness parallel to no other. This idea is anything but new and has been pondered by the public since Hegel, whether you were acquainted with this great philosopher or not. It was him who also remarked that the modern world is the only world that cannot be destroyed because it is thoroughly empty. At that point he called himself the last philosopher and called for the end of history. Hegel solved this problem of the end of history by making this world-history itself the history of intellect, morals, philosophy, etc. and creating what we know today as "the world spirit". His philosophy cannot be overcome, it can only be discussed...

No philosophy can be ever falsified like the sciences, it is true logically and is only meant to be part of a world-building discussion as Lessing would put it drawing from Augustine's famous phrase "In the same sense that these things are all true, it is for the same reason that they are all false". Yet the second part of the Hegelian spell remained untold until Auschwitz: This modern world is the only that cannot be destroyed since it's empty, it's true; yet everything inside it can indeed be easily destroyed, including the human world. The modern world is an idea, no more than that, an illusion. But as George Steiner remarked is the most authentic and revolutionary intellectual idea in the whole of Western history; the divorce between the world and the words. This could be also referred to as the metaphysical "rebellion" of Albert Camus, who being the first existentialist in the professional sense of the word spoke already in his time of destruction, abyss, suicide, totalitarianism, terrorism. He was forerun by Schelling who as early as 1850 said "Once you begin with conceptual content divorced from existence, you discover with consternation after an interval of intoxication that you have no vessel to contain this content", this was his attack on Hegel.

Modernity is an illusion but it is this illusion itself what creates it: The denial of having any chains to our past or in the words of Rousseau: "Man is born free and he remains in chains", idea which was familiar to any of the great thinkers from Parmenides to Kafka. It was this modernity the only possible social arrangement that permitted the emancipation of the Jews and that makes it possible for me to face this Christian audience with all the dignity my position entitles, it also made possible the enactment of a democratic government in Germany and that Germans and Jews can discuss these matters of political importance today. At the same time it made possible Auschwitz and this is true in the historical sense - no philosophizing required here. The deliverance from chains threw us outright into a very seldom form of nothingness; the early Biblical humanist a-la-Eramus spoke about how only one can provide himself with meaning. This meaning can still today be found in love, in theology, in philosophy or in simple unreflected faith; yet it can be also found in death, murder and extermination.

Since I am as well an outright defender of this modern social arrangement the melodramatic pessimism is not in place, I am only stating the obvious. Not defending modernity means doing away with Hitler and others of his kind, but also doing away with democracy, freedom of speech, individuality and tension. I do not want to do away with the later so I have to tackle with the former. Not philosophically like the scholastic tradition tackled with evil, but politically. I cannot personally tackle with it politically as a citizen of the world - concept that can only make one burst in hysterical laughter, I have to tackle with it according to the facts of my life, of my everyday life for which my philosophical background might be as useless as it was for Benjamine Fondane, pupil of the great Lev Shestov who despite his tutelage under one of the most important philosophers could only find his way to Birkenau. At about the same time the literati Roman Rolland wrote to his friend Stefan Zweig "art can provide us consolation as individuals, but it is powerless before reality".

It is now an everyday phenomenon to speak about "world-peace", universal love, freedom, deliverance and at the same time ignore altogether the Nazi past of the Germans. The Jewish thinker Gillian Rose returns to the spell of Plato: "To Plato, doing wrong could only occur if one lacked knowledge of what was right - one could not intend wrong; to Aristotle, it was possible to intend and act rightly but unwittingly to incur wrong - a dilemma, but not one of malicious foresight. To modernity this dilemma of contingency acquires a systemtic twist: for, it is possible to mean well, to be caring and kind, loving one's neighbour as oneself, yet to be complicit in the corruption and violence of social institutions. Furthermore, this predicament may not correspond to, and maybe not be represented by, any available politics or knowledge."

I will never be able to agree with the functionalist view that what matters about the Shoah is not who made it possible but how; as an intellectual I am obviously parting from theoretical assumptions and dealing on the how, but as a person I can only think about the who. It is impossible to reconcile with this and who if not Milan Kundera to phrase it so accurately: "This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore cynically permitted". For the sake of my moral sanity I cannot reconcile with this tragic past; at the same time one can always have the sociological faith of Agnes Heller and return to Plato again, "It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong". This is not so politically and the means have been created to assure one's world-survival. I have chosen myself as a person and as long as this is this choice cannot be for anything other than being a good person. This is the legacy of Kierkegaard in our times best represented by Weber and Heller.

It is the democratic society the one that provided Hitler and others with the tools they could make use of to eliminate human tensions and promise a paradise on earth which necessitates by proxy the elimination of some undesirable elements, among them always the Jews. I do not want to destroy this possibilities because in doing so I would destroy democracy altogether and engage in some sort of neo-liberal Stalinism not alien to certain political circles today. That trend is obviously patterned into the tradition and relying on Greek sources itself; the problem is that the Greek model of democracy might work very well for the upper classes and elite, but not so for most of us who would see ourselves back in Athens under the yoke of being slaves, women and foreigners. A democratic model of the modern West can rely on Greek sources only hermeneutically, not historically; in doing so it is faithful to modernity. Totalitarianism did not come willy-nilly from nowhere, it took place right at the center of modern democratic imagination and that is why it remains an entirely modern phenomenon without parallels in the pre-modern arrangements; only inspiration.

For this very reason together with its messianic elements, Totalitarianism remains a political model in our days and by no means an outdated one. I am not expressing that the German National Party is a totalitarian party but historically it holds a bind within and alongside modern forms of totalitarian government. In a democratic country all forms of political expression must be tolerated, this is almost a statement of faith. I am not advocating the churches and religious leaders not to oppose vehemently the rise of Fascism in our days, I am rather asking that this should be done by means other than violence and totalitarianism.

This shall bring one to have second thoughts about the war in Iraq and Fukuyama's recent recanting of his neo-conservative views, this shall not be discussed here but only stated that the form of totalitarianism found down there (which in practice means down here) is no different from the one that found its place among the Germans more than half a century ago. No doubt Hitler had sought shelter beneath the Greek political tradition no less than we do, present-day Israelis and Germans. But let us not fall into the trap of German Idealism by turning our modes of thinking into imaginary flights from reality into a "homeland" for centuries arid and deserted. Remember the Biblical tradition of interpretation that explains how the Flood was brought about by violence of one man against the other, more than any other form of moral corruption. Violence is the highest form of moral corruption and in the world where as Foucault remarked the good-bad-evil has been replaced by normal-abnormal-pathological under the auspices of a triumphant science-based world-view, this is always possible and never labeled as "bad" or "evil", simply slightly abnormal and quite indifferent to any other possible solution. As soon as we have enacted a division of labour that is functional rather than social we have also established functional categories of judgement; because I support the functional division of labour I do not want to eliminate this problem, I want to deal with it.

This could be understood as a very light and sophisticated form of moral and political appeasement but it is not. The German National Party must be permitted but it cannot be left alone to solve the problems of German society just as Modernity cannot be left alone to run its course, because otherwise its discontent that produces it anew it will never cease and we will find ourselves experiencing this form of painful modernity until the very end of times; which if it will arrive at all will find no one on the face of the earth. This is my only thesis: Modernity in so far as it cannot be destroyed if it is left alone will never cease from existing in such a somber and discreet way as it does today. An independent modernity is able to create firstly a theory of morals and emotions for modernity which would be by no means human (since it would be technology-based) and by doing so would eliminate the tension between word and world; it could be said then Modernity IS overcome; but only by throwing us into the abyss from whence it sprang, not too different from the speechless world of Auschwitz. Secondly whatever will follow Modernity will never be the pre-modern arrangement, never. That possibility is shun forever.

The only sociological faith that Modernity can embrace is responsibility of the moral kind; with a departure point in the human person and building up through differentiated social clusters and winding up finally in a responsible world that could be self-sustainable. It is the Germans who must solve their political and social problems, not a German ideology among many. The moral philosophy of the modern world cannot be a moral philosophy of philosophy but a moral philosophy out of human sources for the use of human culture, this idea is as old as Herman Cohen and Ernst Cassirer. Culture in fact (not the culture of the production stage but the discussions on plays, movies, novels, etc) is the only bond we have left with each other in the extreme alienation that our world dwells at. It can be our only salvage, not in producing salvation or redemption (for who would like a world like this redeemed after all?) but in producing safeguards not from God or Lucifer or even technology, but from ourselves!

The parties cannot be ignored or even worse supressed. They must be dealt with. Their existence should be only the symbol of a critical democracy; at the same time that the same democracy than enabled the means for its existence must also enable the means for its control, meaning that democracy is based on the struggle between freedom and equality in the Kantian sense; this struggle can be overcome to some extent as the American political discourse has shown, yet it is clear to me this model is not applicable to Germany, the struggle can simply be maintained under observation so that its course will not break free into a pseudo-existentialist arbitrariness as in the Heideggerian model. Too much freedom for the German National Party risks our equality before the law with them and too much equality risks our freedom alongside them. At this point we shall speak as well briefly about the Law; our moral maxims cannot be understood as individual understandings, they must become axiomatic and unanimously accepted by all, they cannot be even thought about, they are taken for the granted. The laws that ensure world-sustainability and responsibility should become our confession of faith because ever since Plato they cannot be rationally proven. You could even call, if you wish, my approach, "theology of world-responsibility".

This is the only way in which we can protect ourselves. This solution is only temporary for we can't politicize in moral terms a person or a nation's heart, they are free to think and believe anything they want but their freedoms cannot be let free to act as they wish. It is part of the structure of modernity to understand that our social arrangement altogether with its laws and maxims and creeds is merely temporary. Modernity does not grant sureness of the self, certainly not of the nation. We are living under the spell of certain world-pictures we have ourselves created, they are not harmful in the sense that they're not absolutely true, they can only become meaningful.

It is no longer the question of mythology against rationality that we had in the Marxist system, for as Cassirer pointed out it was in the age of reason that a mythology from the sources of reason created the ground for modern fundamentalism and its motivation lies therein at the core of modern existential frustration, that is at the same time the most powerful driving force for creativity and plasticity in everyday life; we are not perfectly dovetailed individuals - if we were, we had become already one-dimensional therefore free of fear and undoubtedly uninterested in the toil of everyday life, no one would write poetry or read theology and any criticism would be as dumbfounded as the conversion of the Jews is for contemporary theology.

Neo-Nazis cannot be fought against with theology or with moral philosophies, because while we ponder in our clusters they act politically in everyday life; therefore it is that precisely we are called for, to act politically in everyday life as the natural consequence of our thoughts. If you choose yourself for thinking then it must mean you also choose yourself for thinking of the good. Choosing yourself for thinking of the bad means choosing a sophistication that only leads to irresponsibility and backwardness. Backwardness is a fact of the world, people are by no means generally modern or contingent, only some of us. If you choose yourself for the care of the world it must mean you cannot hold this to be acted politically by murder or oppression.

There is no other option to prevent radical evil from dehumanizing society, than to choose yourself to think good. From the viewpoint of practical reason choosing yourself for thinking of the bad is consequentially wrong for others as soon as you act in the world; therefore one must think that even though it is an option, this option should not be an option. I do not uphold this position because I find it to be the best or even rational, I uphold this position because it seems to me up to this point the only sustainable one and the ground of my sociological faith. We can have no answers on whether the NPD will succeed in bringing Hitler back or simply caring on what is important for German society, we can only ponder on whether they represent a significant threat to our society and whenever that will come about they should be fought against under the spell of democracy and the tools available legally to punish potential murderers for example, just as these selfsame tools have been used to enable their existence.

I do not know if the Green Party of the Christian Democrats can be dangerous for my existence in democratic societies, it is simply that they do not have historical antecedents of the kind we discussed above here, perhaps the NPD will just go into history as an attempt to a very morally-minded right-wing party, but it is for some reason my fear that this is not very feasible. Yet despite my gut feeling I shall not pass judgement so early in their debut as a convention-holding party. If for any reason at all the Nazi past of Germany should suffice as a reason to watch them carefully. They might offer radical alternatives to modern problems and from within the boredom inherent to modern liberal ideology we are in strait needs for radical thought, but the "good" of modernity has shown that this radicalism can be sought for also in many place else. We shall never get rid of extreme and fundamentalist ideas, it is part of the structure of modernity, but nonetheless they can be effectively controlled by democratic means. Once the democratic ways have been broken and revolution ensues then it is a totally different discussion the one to hold on how to protect one's values, yet it is my feeling that the time is not ripe for that still. But it might happen yet only following the demise anew of the democratic channels which the history of 20th century revolutionary movements has shown to be possible. Modernity allows this possibility therefore we are compelled to "choose" the other possibilities that modernity also offers.

An arrangement so new and radically challenging like modernity does not admit of prophets, it can only harbor social and political theoreticians, some poets and with luck a couple of good theologians. In this sense no one can foresee whether it will survive no matter how much speculation there is on this matter; it is difficult to assure the survival of an arrangement with so little spirituality and carrying a death-wish at the very spiritual center of it, yet it does not mean it will not survive by its own means which it now has. Agnes Heller said once that whenever you choose yourself for philosophy you are as good a philosopher as you can ever be; you can learn more, go through the material, prepare lectures, progress, yet you cannot improve because what primarily matters is the choice.

I would like to interpret this Kierkegaardism as one of the pillars of the Protestation that was midwife to Modernity in two accounts: Firstly that it was this Protestation what made me a man of Modernity, but it was difficult to imagine when I first embraced it how often this Protestation would send me back to Judaism and Christianity through the backdoor; secondly that this could be applied as well to human persons who chose thinking of the good and therefore acting the good: Once you choose yourself for the good you are as good a person as you can ever become even though you can progress, personally you cannot improve because it would diminish your humanity.

Your statement of faith could be: Because I chose myself for the good as there were no other practical options available I am good and therefore I am responsible for the world at any rate. I could go as far as betraying Descartes' "I think therefore I am" in saying that the being is already an implicit condition (not a value) as in the Biblical narrative of the Old Testament, accordingly my Existentialism would be phrased thus "I think therefore I act". In being a contingent person this choice is irreversible, only there it can gain a theological dimension of sorts. If you have chosen yourself for the good it means you fall under the spell of Plato in that "it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong", but if they wrong your world it does not mean you cannot seek to defend it but no nations or systems can do this. The personal choice is what is at stake, in 1933 and in 2006. "I have set the heaven and earth as witnesses that I have given you a choice, choose life so that you and your children might live". Just like only individual people could save individual Jews in WWII only individual people can fight individual threats, globality at times is only the catch-name for irresponsibility.

"The modern equivalent of repentance is the responsible use of power" -Harvey Cox.

Home To?

Agnes Heller and the Ethics of "The World We Shall Come Home To"

[Interview with Simon Tormey]

A final question, you recently wrote a paper called ‘where are we at home?’ in which you reflect on the character of modern consciousness, but I’m just wondering as someone who has by force of necessity lived all around the world if you feel a special kind of affinity with that question. Do you know where ‘home’ is?

I wrote this paper on the basis of two meetings, one with a man who is still living in Italy and the other with a lady on the plane. These were real experiences. I really started to think about this matter and to think over this problem of home for the modern man through these two stories. In a way, this was also a little bit about me, but not at the time when I wrote this. When I wrote this it was after the changes in 1989-90 and I knew I would definitely be here at home, and I had not the slightest doubt in my mind where home was; but looking back to previous experiences, when I left Hungary, I believed I left it for good and I wanted to find a home somewhere else where I was not ‘at home’. Then I really felt these issues on my own skin, but when I wrote this paper I was thinking about it as an existential issue, about existential experience, about modern man and time experience, space experience. It’s part and parcel of the philosophy of modernity because whether we are at home anywhere is one of the crucial issues of the experience of modern man and woman.

Should we worry about the phenomenon of existential homelessness?

There is positive and negative homelessness. There is a kind of homelessness that is really chosen. There is a kind of person who doesn’t want to be at home because to have a home is basically a case of being bound to something and modern man sometimes wants to be entirely ‘free from’, and not to have a home is a kind of negative freedom, just like not having a wife or not having a family can be a kind of freedom. You can choose not to have family. You can choose not to have a home, but if you happen not to have a home without having chosen it, this is one of the great burdens of modern man. This is really a very difficult psychological state, and extremely difficult to cope with. That’s like you want to have a family but you can’t have one; you want to have someone with whom you can share your life, but somehow you never succeeded in finding someone. So with modern man very frequently they do not succeed at feeling at home anywhere and then they want to escape this place and want to have a family somewhere else and then try to have something else. This is a source of greatest unhappiness. It is totally different from freely chosen homelessness.

So is loneliness the modern condition because it corresponds with our notion of what it means to be free?

Arendt was right when she discussed the difference between solitude and loneliness. Solitude is what you freely choose. Loneliness is superimposed upon you by accident or fate. Modernity allows both possibilities.
================================================================

I shall not undertake to start this reflections from a philosophical world-picture for various reasons, philosophical discourse aims to the building of theoretical systems different to those in biology and sociology in that these systems cannot be falsified; they can at most be vexed, used, misused, destroyed but in fact they can never be falsified, only discussed. I also hold a personal distrust for philosophical speculation. Somehow else my view is rather misleading because in escaping philosophy at "the end of philosophy" I am returning to it in a Kantian-most rigidity; this is the only language that born at the feet of age-old traditions has provided me with a space for reflection itself. Without verifying or denying the above stated claims I also house in my thoughts the hope that my reflection upon the ethical world that they shall be based on real experiences to which the books have been only the second layer within a series of conversations that have involved real people that have turned away from the questions of the systems to address human questions in their innermost idiosyncrasy and arbitrariness.

I would like to start with Heller's basic assumption from her system of Ethics, such being the musing of Wittgenstein that Ethics must be a condition of the world to the same degree Logic is. It means as it did in Levinas' critique of Heidegger that the ethical being is implicit automatically and by proxy in the definition of being in the world and accordingly in the definition of being so far. No sources from the pre-rational world exist that can confirm these assumptions and as early as we can travel back in history we face the walls of religious traditions that make the obvious assumption that these sources for morality in the public and the private stem from a divinely-ordained commandment; in this context we shall nonetheless eliminate the Greek tradition of morality which in fact is in itself the sole theoretical basis of our contemporary political life, yet in the limited context of its theoretical assumptions. Moreover according to Jaspers we need not seek the mythical image of the ethical man because this has become already impossible with Socrates; the pre-rational world with all its mesmerizing darkness and clarity remains shut off forever from our world-pictures. The practical assumptions of political life have come with a very different label; they are painted with the colorful paradoxes of the human condition; no matter the tradition we're making use of for our analysis this is a concept common to all forms of thought, and as Aristotle put it human nature is something common to all cities. We cannot dissect the human condition with the same degree of accuracy we use to dissect a human heart from a sickly body and replace it with its artificial yet functional counterpart. This means ultimately that the human condition belongs to an onset of theoretical assumptions partly empirical and partly spiritual that become concretized only in their abstractness.

For Heller the world cannot exist without ethics, even of the negative kind; this leads me to consider an argument that the void of ethical constructions - which is indeed a construction not unlike anything else that "exists" in the world, a paradox set against the background of Biblical accounts, could in fact create a meta-paradox in which the world disappears. For Hannah Arendt the idea of the world is second in importance to none and she goes on to claim that animals have soul but do not have a world; this in particular connected to her reflections on education, that animals are so thoroughly specialized in their labor that they have obliterated all possibility of having a world; there is obviously a moral call in this statement for a more generic kind of education which is not available in the modern world in general, and in the modern condition of labor-division (a sociological tenet) in particular.

This generic and publicly-available knowledge is no longer sustainable in the social compartmentalization typical of Modernity (once more set against the background of sociological theory, in tension-constraints with my hermeneutic model that aims to bridge the gap between theory and life by means of an interpretive model that addresses human questions not by answering them but by pushing them to the limit of philosophy and therefore of rationality; not unlike Arendt's model of Kantian political philosophy, the aim is not philosophical verification but the enabling of one among many possible modes of discourse), therefore the only liable alternative to solve this problem is the limited possibility of human culture. It is worthwhile mentioning Heller's thought on the cultural sphere: Culture is not in the production process but rather in the interaction and discussion, for example in everyday discussions about movies, theater plays and books; this exercise comes closely tied with all of the thinking traditions the western world has produced and it is indeed how philology since the ancient times has opened the hermeneutic space to create as in the model of Steiner, present presences from old sentences; because it is indeed part of this being human the unfinished (therefore constantly renewed but never improved upon) world-picture narrative. Steiner also presents an incredibly useful metaphor of art and criticism in the development of a "cultural" culture or a human culture. For him all possible is already different and dissenting from the world, it is in fact a critique of the world and by sheer necessity enabled simultaneously the visible spaces that make the world itself visible creating spaces for sociability and immediately thereafter for politics. By stating this I'm obviously distancing myself from Kantian models of political life and rather adopting Lessing and Plato. I shall leave temporarily the question of cultural philosophy as it stands beyond the scope of my reflections, so that I can timely return to the world of ethics and the ethics of the world.

Note

Several thoughts actually hinder me from thinking and writing as it should be, perhaps in particular because my reading habits have significantly decreased; this is no troubling matter for I am distancing myself and acquiring a vantage point that eventually allows me to ask entirely human questions, questions of understanding instead of theoretical problem-solving hints. This greatly differs from what I had considered philosophy to be in those days when I dwelled under the pine tree in the company of Giorgia - my first teacher. I believe our way of arriving at this "understanding" no longer matches but it is her to whom I owe the life of the spirit.

I'm also but very vaguely philosophical because I'm alien to the system, yet unlike Nathan I do see a need to read systematically not in order to make statements or write "systems" but to have a rather comprehensive overview of a problem by means other than Logic. This is meant obviously in the formal sense, human questions are asked by different Logics and that is what I've learnt from Heller and Simmel. I insist on the model of the photograph which must be looked at from many diverse vantage points within and outside the universe but by no means from all of them; that would be a systematic overview which in turn would eliminate the radical freedom in the idea of the individuality; this nevertheless requires many different approaches and certainly extensive readings more than anything in political theory. It is always daunting that one finds the sources of inspiration in Kierkegaard altogether engaging in the Protestation that gave us Modernity and that indirectly was midwife to the technological imagination; the daunting part comes when (as I saw in a book recently) that the idea of the individuality (not in the political sense) is as old as the Western canon and that can therefore be pinpointed from the writings of Prophets, Greek poets and Roman statemen.

I would certainly like to agree with this entirely, but the truth is I haven't looked up into the matter. It seems to me the concept of individual is quintessential for the rise of the religious imagination and played a pivotal role on the development of thinking structures out of pre-rational narratives. This individual in any case couldn't have been too political, but it could have certainly contained a fiction that could be used as a lethal weapon against certain modes of criticism that follow the thread of the modern narrative; the rise of the individuality certainly doesn't come unaccompanied by some sources for freedom which basically rests on a relationship of tension. Freedom is certainly the necessary consequence of politics or at least the desirable consequence; but in turn cannot be made an end in itself because freedom as a whole lacks power to liberate at all. I really wanted to write something else, but it should suffice for now... I need to read. I just thought for a second that an early beginning implies an early end and yet when I'm not able to speak about this with a translation of personal experiences it haunts me.

Women in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt, Agnes Heller, Eveline Goodman-Thau

My thanks are due to my colleague Silke Wahle for her wise comments which motivated me to change this essay from scratch, to Agnes Heller for living inspiration, to Eveline Goodman-Thau for her companionship in thinking and reliance on me; and to Jerome Kohn for sharing important pieces of the life of his teacher Hannah Arendt with me with so much cordiality and kindness. But more than from any of them I learnt from the life of the mind.

To Dr. Ralf Balke
Who has supported the philosophy, the man, the ideas, the struggle and the life

"For the same reasons this, is all in a certain sense true, and in a certain sense false"
-St. Augustine

Women in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt, Agnes Heller & Eveline Goodman-Thau

In memory of the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt
100 Years 1906 - 2006

Humanity is usually understood these days as a form of education that is often available only to the few privileged who do not need worry about pursuing a lucrative career and to those feeble-minded whose spirits are filled with worldly questions and doubts; accordingly most of us were raised up to believe that the "humanities" person is that who has attained an academic degree and that most likely is a jobless cynical reformer of the world or one of those "intelligentsia" people who have understood the world and have formed cults from within the academic halls with initiates and converts; the latter are also known as ill-stricken by the Ph.D syndrome.

It has not always been so; for the German dramatist Lessing for example, humanity did not mean an academic degree but rather experiencing the world in anger and laughter, experiencing the artifacts that complement our life on earth only in regard to their effect in the world; for Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers it meant to include those who were pariahs and outsiders and the mentally-ill; and even St. Augustine had his own thoughts, he believed that humanity was the community of believers bound by sin. In fact they might have been talking about humanity as the mere quality of being human.

Being human is one of the greatest tasks of the 21st century; whose predecessor the 20th had failed in attaining by declaring as some self-proclaimed intellectuals did, freedom not only from God -who was declared dead not by the old crowd of unbelievers and heretics but by the theologians and men of faith, but also from the human. "We are living in a post-human world", so said a British artist who drafted the "post-human manifesto" and surrendered with his weakness for life, his feelings, his pasts, his memories, surrendered to the technological imagination and called for the day when the last bound left to men with earth will disappear - the creation of life. By then people will be able to dwell on cities removed from the earth -the quintessence of the human condition[1], removed from the sight of nature and from injustice - all the houses will look alike, the funerary and the kindergarden, the concentration camp and the church.

A world eminently just and egalitarian, a world in which all people will be one and the same. This could be perfectly translated into a modern library where the lives of the authors and the suffering they endured in their promethean task has been turned into numbers of a catalog, properly stored and carefully updated with new sticker-labels into tidily sorted-out boxes. "Humanity" has become 00456, "Natural Landscapes" is called 06543 and "History" falls under the rubric TL4301; does it not resemble in some way the world of Auschwitz? Whereby Moshe and Frieda were 04567 and 04566, the beautiful girl with the red freckles was 05678 and the neighbor was known as 07880.

I am not exercising here a Marxist critique of capitalism or fingering at the discontents of neo-liberalism and calling for the retrieval of an ancient glorious past. I am just making sure while I write that we are living in dark times; yet for those of us "newborn" of this generation the difference is hardly noticeable, we have not known any other world but instead are often faced with the most serious questions of contemporary philosophy that no matter what their content is, finish with "....of the human world, if it is going to have a future at all". Perhaps you can call this a form of anarchy, political disappointment or the simple ranting of an overqualified and jobless youth. I am just pointing at a world where our language has been rendered ineffective; in fact we all have a language we call a mother tongue, that we associate with our childhoods and memories, with the first love and whether it was the movies or the poems or the songs in the radio, it immediately become a referential point for what we are, that language is indeed what we are.

Yet the language is no longer fit to describe the world, reason for which we can often fail to observe the sombre character of our age; this language we speak and that expresses our desire to love, to live, to enjoy, is not a humanizing language. Perhaps it is good for McDonald's and Seinfeld, but it is not the language of Shakespeare. It is some form of esperanto in which you can say "SOS" and "breaking news" like you do in a morse code that allows only a certain number of combinations; it is not a language to write sonnets and certainly not a language to write history. "And God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness"[2]. If this was the same language God used to create the world, no wonder the theologians have reached a verdict and hastened his execution; but perhaps that is the only proof of the divine shadow, it is a quest for language. If indeed we would speak that language then we could create life afresh and send God on paid retirement.

Dark times in the other hand are not something you can unfeignedly presence or ward off with a hand, they simply dawn on us all of a sudden - "As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years" [3]. Dark times might sometimes also resemble the sleep of a baby, because humanity seems not to have reached its adolescence and the uninterrupted sleep of the infant continues unhindered by catastrophes, bombs, exiles, genocide, poverty, injustice. He might know better, and deliberately not awaken. Hannah Arendt said in her last public appearance: "We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the diving lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past. At such moments of history when the writing on the wall becomes too frightening, most people flee to the reassurance of day-to-day life with its unchanging pressing demands." [4] They always come uninvited like a stranger at a feast[5].

Humanity in Dark Times. But couldn't this be somehow a deception? One could just as well claim in a very Christian sense that the times have been dark ever since Eve and the apple, which turned all knowledge into falsehood. Literature shows that exiles, homelessness and specially darkness have accompanied humankind since its earliest memories in Homer and Hesiod; darkness is not a prodigal son of the modern imagination. Poor Odysseus had been trapped for long with the nymph inside the cave and no light reached them. "Then the Lord said to Moses, "Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that darkness will spread over Egypt- darkness that can be felt" [6]. Yet dark times contain a magic elixir of creativity and human power, one of the starkest driving forces for progress and improvement of one world upon the other, but the deliverance from evil does not go unpaid; the creativity of dark times comes with the boredom that always follows their end.

Freedom remains one of the most sought-for commodities of the human race, but its achievement rarely turns out to be a source of happiness; the prophet has promised that "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because God hath anointed me to gladden the humble; he hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to those bound a complete opening of the eyes" [7]. The opening of the eyes is perhaps the most paradoxical description of what the modern world is, because the opening can remind one of Hesiod's words that nearing the end of times children will be born with their eyes wide-open; so open from such an early age to realities of many different kinds and manifold truths that can eventually cause blindness and this blindness in itself is a double-bind, curse and blessing but unavoidably comes in the company of the most abject darkness. "I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them." [8].

Immediately thereafter we turn to the experts for advise and bring about an Exodus from the aridness and crumbling structures of Athens in a pilgrimage toward Jerusalem; we want to unearth the ever-alert prophets and renew the works of Creation. We want answers but they cannot be given to us, we could not live them yet we proclaim "They answered: Your servants have come from a very distant country because of the fame of the Lord your God. For we have heard reports of him: all that he did in Egypt" [9], as though we were before the Delphic oracle bringing sacrifices for the burnt offering to the Gods and demanding the prophetic vision just like Oedipus did, brining upon himself endless misery; the prophet scorns us and responds by saying "but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering" [10]. We've been mistaken once again, a sin replaced with a crime. A world-Christology does not seem to be of much help here.

This is where we turn to the Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, and despite controversies and historical arguments, disagreements and bans, we find a group of women who lived through times darker than ours and that throughout their lives did not cease to call the world to a court, not to pass judgement and a verdict on its end like most of the philosophers, the theologians and religious traditions did but to teach you us that it is not in the courts but in the minutiae of everyday life that we are called to pass judgement. Faculty that has obviously falled into desrepute following the horros of the 20th century which hold very little significance for us today other than the way (often unnoticed) in which they shaped the modern mind that creates the modern world.

They are not rooted on any philosophy -for its demise has been advertised since the rise of modern science and the technological imagination as the supreme ruler, ideology, but on the long-forsaken faculty of thinking, it is only in thinking what we are doing that the world can be made a better place. No promises of a glorious past or of redemption in the distant future; the answers do not lie anywhere and the questions cannot be formulated in the yesterday or tomorrow, in heavenly kingdoms and utopias but only today, right now and in this world. They who lived in that world of European Jewry and that perhaps were their last representatives,a culture that echoes today only in very dim and feeble memories. This is the world they loved, they love this world. And as a philosopher the only thing left to you is your love's work, and this love quintessentially is the only salvation from the thoughtlessness of the technological man; the one who no longer awaits anything, no longer hopes, he is in himself a terminated project, an artifact, an object of instrumental value.

This is the legacy of Hannah Arendt, one of the forerunners and bearer of a philosophical revolution that did not pretend to reform the world, but to show us that it cannot be repaired by eliminating its frailty, since it is actually this frailty and lacking in something what makes it livable and different from the concentration camp. Hannah Arendt was not a typical philosopher and today one has a problem trying to classify her into something that belongs only in the categories of a world that no longer exists, of a world in which she perhaps did not live either. She is no prophet of any sorts but she speaks in the words of the prophet through the only language that we moderns can grasp - the language of reason, that of philosophy and the books, but she is no philosopher of the books. Hannah Arendt philosophized because she wanted to understand and she went wherever her thinking led her showing us even in her mistakes and misunderstandings the limits of philosophy, the limits of humanity and the rich-well that springs from the life of the mind.

She who studied under some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century and saw the public eye much more than most of her contemporaries had a concern which was not simply that of a Platonic philosopher calling for interlocutors and discussions; she believed that this understanding will never bring us to the answers but the process shall make some space for reflection "when the chips are down". We shall be able somehow to recover the world we have turned over to the hands of machines and artifacts, "the recovery of the public world". She was a political scientist because it was in her view not Man but Men in the plural who populate the earth and they are the only ones from whom a solution to the frailty of this world might come, not by eliminating it in the search for an ideal world but to recognize that this world in fact is the only one we have in our possession and until some answers will come from heaven we must engage with this world; the frailty can only become a gain - a kernel of sociological faith. We can only achieve it by thinking, thinking not as a consequence of philosophy but a companion, and acting in the world not as something deliberate but as the obvious consequence of our thoughts; this is what she meant by recovering the public world. She found the first sources of this plurality not in the Greek historians or the Christian fathers but in the Bible, "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female created he THEM" [11].

When Hannah Arendt wrote the book that caused her utmost disrepute (Eichmann in Jerusalem) she was not simply accusing or defending anybody but claiming something much more universal than her many detractors have seen; she was not playing the historian or the judge but showing that after the concentration camps the categories we had for judgement had fallen into a disrepute such that it was necessary to unearth all of our traditions since the beginning of the memory and use them to move in the invisible space of the mind; this has proven our major difficulty in understanding her because for most of us anything intangible and not immediately visible is often demised as unworthy of inspection, but everything there is in the world belongs to invisible images, the way we get to know things, how they are constructed and disappear. She maintained altogether the vision of the uniqueness of Auschwitz and the extermination of the Jewish people; this phenomenon can only be dealt comically, there exist no pre-established categories to describe the monstruous deeds, no rationale can be brought forward politically or philosophically, at least not anymore.

She called for a recovery of the memory and as early as 1929 she wrote "It is memory and not expectation that gives unity and wholeness to human existence"[12]. The cause of her major disrepute is not only the crooked interpreters but also that there is no discussion as heated as the one on a book no one has read. Hannah Arendt thought that we should stop for a second the over-academizing and speculating at our universities and look at the world, turn around - like Moses did in the wilderness and met God; to realize things do not look like they did before and who if not she understood, she who had lived in that world which preceded ours.

She was the daughter of a philosophical revolution that started in the 19th century as the Jewish thinkers became aware that the course taken by Modernity since its painful and glorious birth will lead not only to its destructive power but to its endlessness, this intellectual Genesis and Exodus that had become apparent with Spinoza. It would blur forever the lines of history and condemn humanity to a blind world in which things will seem just what they were; "there's presence but no real essence" (Agnes Heller). But there is no more Hannah Arendt and the universities continue their programs, teaching Aristotle and Heidegger to people that are grandsons of Holocaust survivors and who saw the world crumbling before them, they saw the lines that divided not life and death, but beginnings and ends; now we can only speak about ends of every possible thing on earth.

Hannah Arendt wrote in her last book: "Hence the possible advantage of our situation, following the demise of metaphysics and philosophy would be twofold. It would permit us to look on the past with new eyes, unburdened and unguided by any traditions, and thus to dispose of a tremendous wealth of raw experiences without being bound by any prescriptions as how to deal with these treasures; "Our heritage comes to us by no-will and testament". The advantage would be even greater had it not been accompanied, almost inevitably, by a growing inability to move, on no matter what level, in the realm of the invisible; or to put it in another way, had it not been accompanied by the disrepute into which everything that is not visible, tangible, palpable has fallen, so that we are in danger of losing the past itself together with our traditions" [13]. And late in her life she said that judging as the political consequence of thinking may indeed prevent catastrophes, in the rare moments when things are at stake[14].

But this is not to be done only in the academia and in classes and seminars on ethics and "life-management" but in everyday life, aspect in which she leaves altogether the Western traditions of philosophy and thinks like the Sages of the Talmud; she does not want answers but rather desires those fleeting moments stricken on us by the routine in which we can surely distinguish good from evil. Not from a religious or moral standpoint, but simply from the perspective of the community life, what is good for us, a social contract that lies beyond politics and then becomes philosophy again after having passed through the world; it was she who claimed that one must think with body and soul or not at all. Prof. Jennifer Ring said in 1997 that it was Arendt who came closer to thinking as a Jew (something downplayed by intellectuals anywhere in the world today) in that she related the life of the mind to the life of the community[15]; but in a world ill with a contingency for philosophical understanding Prof. Ring has become a lone voice, the current trends in the "professional" thinking world are simply theoretical speculations that resemble the sleep of a baby, and that imaginary flight into a distant past that in itself caused the ills of modernity; not because modernity is an ill-artifact but because since its base is freedom one can as well use it to save mankind from tyranny or just as well to completely destroy it, yet without noticing that anything changed. The grass still grows next to the gas chambers in Auschwitz and children can still play undeterred in Chernobyl. A popular song of Shabbat reads: "He shall summon freedom for the son and the daughter, he shall guard over you as the beloved one; pleasant are you names and they shall never cease, for in the seventh day they shall dwell and rest"[16].. only that there was no seventh day in Auschwitz.

A philosophical system that cannot be a guide in the blindness of our interesting times, that fails to approach what happens in the world, is not worthy of pursuance. Jerome Kohn, a former student of Arendt and editor of a book recently published on Arendt wrote in the introduction: "Young men and women in many countries have begun to understand that being at home in the world requires rethinking the past and reconstituting its treasures and disasters. They recognized that "thinking without fences", in Arendt's phrase, it the condition under which the will to act still makes sense to them. These youths, who turn to "Hannah" (as they call her) as a guide they trust, will find the difference and urgency of what faces them nowhere more decisively than in her writings. Those are addressed to the "newcomers" as Hannah Arendt called them, on whom the future of the human world, it if it to have one, depends"[17]. It is in our hands to recover the Jewish Arendt "in this world" and use those legacies; Arendt never wanted to be a philosopher of the institutions but a thinking companion, and in companionship one can always choose the good and reject the rest; companionship is the only way left to us to think, whether we use philosophy to achieve this at all or not, the important thing is that we try.

Hannah Arendt was not alone in her efforts but instead those have been silenced by the old Platonic adage "the beautiful must be the good"; one is reluctant to face a world that excels any other in paradoxes; the destruction of the thin layer of ice on which our freedom rest is just across the street, knocking on the door with a friendly eye and us left without any protection other than skyscrappers and the cable TV. Two women have joined her efforts; a social philosopher and a religious thinker - Agnes Heller and Eveline Goodman-Thau. Quasi-contemporaries of Arendt, Jews, Holocaust survivors and therefore reminders of our situation; even when they are not blind completely, but struggle everyday to shut off the shadow in order to bring us closer to that light the God of the narrative created with language on day one. Agnes Heller and Eveline Goodman-Thau live today sheltered by the language their access to traditions and people unknown to us provide them with, their voices cry out in the dark and lead us somewhere, to a place where a voice can be heard at all; where language is something more than the SOS code for buddies and e-bay.

But their voices aren't heard, people want philosophy but not ethical questions; of what interest are they anyway? We want to write books that will have numbers on them and after our demise will be buried in the library storehouse until the next colloquium; right thereafter we will place them back into their shelf-grave and join the choirs of murderers and clowns; but we are not guilty, we do it only to protect our sanity even if we are giving up our humanity on the way.

Agnes Heller is a professor of philosophy at the New School in New York but no students flock in mass to her classes, certainly not Jewish students; we only want the new stuff, the fun stuff... because in our insecure world we have no time to hear those antiquities on paper, we need to reinvent our world before it will collapse. Her books do not exist in the Hebrew language, her name does not ring a bell for anybody but for those lunatics that waste their time and miss out on the last chapter of the soap opera. A former student of one among the greatest sociologists of the century, a dissenter of Hungarian Communism, Marxist at some point and today a more refined conservative thinker. It was Heller who first recognized the obvious, that one needs to ask whether modernity will survive or not, because its death wish plays a major role in the modern imagination. She is no philosopher of books, but a philosopher of the obvious and in a world turned so abstract then one needs thinkers like that; the obvious of life has become so estranged that one can only see the sparks of humanity from within the stickers with the numbers that differentiate one creature from another, the only thing that differentiates them.

Heller pointed out the wonders of radical thinking; one needs radical thinking, no? Well there the obvious is being stated again. But she goes on to clarify that this is because liberalism is boring and conformist, it never asks new questions, but radical thinking is very Socratic, it makes people angry and irritated. But she's no professional radical like our country flows rich of, radicals who are radical for the sake of modern show. Not a theatrical act a-la-Dante but a TV interview that will fade away as quickly as genocide in Darfur and the birth of a million new babies. What is it that bothers Heller about professional radicals? It is that they seem to know the answer before they ask the question; has anybody ever wondered what is there to it in the secular political parties of our continents? A radical is a living critique of society, and critique is not a symptom of failure but of renewal; a society that cannot be criticized becomes soon a regime. Critique builds bridges in between us and the artifacts of the world. Heller is a radical, because she questioned the nature of justice and inequality, not because she thinks those artifacts will evaporate one day, but because criticism shows that anything on earth can be improved upon with common effort; was is not also common effort what brought the Nazis to almost succeed in their enterprise to wipe out European Jewry? Not alike Hannah Arendt, Heller is someone who thought because she saw the obligation, the duty. She thought and she thinks because she loves.

In an interview from 1997 she said: "My work is my whole life. I would start with my experience of the Holocaust. My father was killed and many of my childhood friends. So this experienced exercised an immense influence on my whole life, particularly on my work. I was always interested in the question: how could this possibly happen, how can I understand this? And this experience of the holocaust was joined with my experience in the totalitarian regime. This brought up very similar questions in my soul-search and world investigation: how could this happen? how could people do things like this? so I had to find out what morality is all about, what is the nature of good and evil, what can I do about crime, what can I figure out about the sources of morality and evil? That was the first inquiry. The other inquiry was a social question: what kind of world can produce this, what kind of world allows such things to happen? what is modernity all about? So it was ideas like these that interested me, and very passionately from the beginning onwards. And I felt I had a debt to pay as a survivor. Writing moral philosophy and philosophy of history for me then became a way to pay my debt as a survivor to the people who could not survive. So in this respect my philosophy became a sacrifice but a sacrifice I enjoyed. And this is not contradictory, I can sincerely say my whole life became a sacrifice to pay my debt and simultaneously enjoyed writing philosophy. For example, the great painters enjoyed painting the crucifixion of Christ, the greatest possible suffering. And they did it by putting color on the canvas. And this apparent contradiction is what what characterizes my life: the things that I have done have been a sacrifice to pay a debt I owe and the ways in which I have done them has been the enjoyment I have derived from philosophy". [18]

Agnes Heller has received prizes that once were awarded to Hannah Arendt, and by means of her critique she has been one of the only people who reached international status to deal extensively enough with Arendt's legacy. Hannah Arendt turns a hundred-years this month and in November one among many conferences will be held in Germany to commemorate the event. In one of them Agnes Heller will receive a medal for her contributions to philosophy that comes with a different undertone, specially for Heller since she has received any possible honor and award that philosophy can bestow - except fame, that is something a thinking companion can never aspire to, it is a gift only awarded in posterity when they will find out the answers if at all while we remain searching.

She will receive a prize from an institution that does not belong to any institution other than the faculty of thinking, and that alike Heller has the only purpose to pay a debt to the world not by bringing back the students and teachers who were murdered but by creating a living tradition that will protect our souls and minds for whenever it will happen again. This institution is headed by no ordinary thinker, Heller's contemporary Eveline Goodman-Thau; a foremost religious thinker. Someone who has lived in Jerusalem for some 50 years and has spent more than half of them thinking, thinking life. Both Goodman-Thau and Heller represent Hannah Arendt not in that they formed an Arendt-lobby but in that the life of the mind is what feeds them life itself; but not many read Goodman-Thau because her language is foreign, her appearance and her words are burdened by the fog of the remembrance, of the oblivion, of love's work. Eveline is a teacher unlike most because she doesn't want to teach you, to instruct you, only you can find the instruction yourself but she wants to be a companionship, a partner and a source of clarity in the obscurity that the knowledge of the past with its treasures and tragedies instills in her. Her teaching is all translation, her work is a big enterprise of translation - Trying to find a language that will create life, that will celebrate life. At times it all turns blurry and you lose the thread but it is a matter of persistence, of desires.

It is with her that I wiped away the dust from the books and saw the human being behind them, the reality that unfolds with terrible pangs before us yet hiding behind screens of unstoppable cars and modern machines, of insurmountable libraries and files. It is that everyday life that one discovers afresh. It is an hermeneutics of the experience, in that by interpreting the text one creates a present presence from an old sentence, one creates and creates and creates; no matter what, the issue at stake is not to destroy. But her living room doesn't hear the voices of the students, her voice remains ignored because often comes attached with the knife of the memory and we don't want to remember, we know all about that. Who cares about what happened in Vienna in 1934, we all have our problems; what does really philosophy have to do with anything? It is designed for rich useless people, on second thought also the concentration camps were but not exclusively, what matters is that they also went there and because of that Goodman-Thau lives beyond her seventies and thinks.

From an published text of Goodman-Thau:
"The edifice of the world is supported only on justice, certainly the edifice of the Jewish heritage; every book has been chosen and placed with love and care. Every book is after all somebody's life, but now all what counts are the numbers, the catalogs. Men and book are numbers alike, perhaps it is difficult to grasp - but how do they then grasp their content? You want to see the other side, to understand others, to appreciate them, but how much, how much compassion is one capable to summon up? Is that the meaning of survival: To tend to your compassion?" [19]

Her legacy is not that we all must become survivors of some sort, one can spare himself those horrors, but instead her voice is pointing toward one difficult truth; that it is in this suffering from the world that one can really experience life, one needs to think a little bit and decide for himself. You cannot escape those choices, those sufferings, and you shouldn't; like Arendt, Heller and Goodman-Thau. Kafka illuminates for us: "You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world: this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid" [20]. In making those choices you become part of the world, you live among others, you live one of many truths and even though it can be daunting soon it turns into a bliss. It is this gift that is only given to the pariah and the outsider, to the one who refuses to fall into this logic categories that also produces catalogs and boxes into which every human being on earth can be caged. It is an ever-lasting comedy whose last act never comes.

It has nothing to do with being a woman or with being a Jew, but rather with being so entirely human as to become abnormal in our eyes, already deformed from the plastic trees and pentobarbital-fed gardens that unfold before our gates as though forming a dead landscape. Nature has died, make space for the new human being!, well if he's human at all.

It is about maintaining a dialogue and it is about being a witness. These women cannot solve the troubles of the world, perhaps they are not to be solved; but unlike us they remember what it looked like when speech was available, when not every word of was an electronic translation.

They bear silent witness. Like the Tzadik that renounced his paradise in order to burn in hell with the rest of the inmates; he prefers to stay with us but will not derive pleasure from the world nor provide it relief. He can only bear witness. And more than loving the world, it is philosophy who becomes a witness of the world, it writes on the memory words that no one can pronounce, it writes sparks of fire within the imagination and save one from the exhausted modern mind that can only imagine a death wish, but not naturally produce it because the technological imagination has not been able to overcome the weakness of people for remembering their history; every corner of the world has a human weakness and an imperfect world is indeed the only one we could be able to live in. The Jewish philosophers are these witnesses, and they are called philosophers not because of the Ph.D syndrome but because they have used revelation and prophecy, this is no compliment or exaltation; it is simply the use of the raw materials of the invisible world. Their prophecy is not prophetic and their revelation doesn't reveal anything new. It only shatters the hollow-ware of the blank pages and write on them over and over. This love's work can be done for as long as one lives, if he lives at all. Hannah Arendt is no longer to teach, she can only be read in a library; Heller and Goodman-Thau live but do not want to write everything they think, because otherwise who will come to listen to their stories? They have no autobiographical legacy, that is unimportant - the facts of one live can be so particular or not, it is irrelevant. But when one has been a philosopher for most of his life looking back there's no past to recount (Etienne Gilson). Other than memories of all sorts one can only leave a testament behind; and their testament is the possibility so entirely human to start anew, to think. This testament comes in the form of one's love's work.

And after they will be gone perhaps the last bridge to connect us with our past and the past of our minds will disappear forever, throwing us into the abyss of our freedom, into an inability to make choices because they are themselves invisible in a world not too visible; they are what makes us different from other species, they are what gives us a world to live in - a token of eternity, of things we can build, build, build, until something rather nice will come out. It is not about coping with life, for who really does by his own choice in the mature age? It is about regaining our vision, and wanting to understand what we see... because once one can see again it is only the beginning, nothing has been solved.

Kafka wrote in his diary: "Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs on hand to ward off a little his despair over this fate... but with this other hand he cannot jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor" [21]

This philosophy is about choices, reason for which is called thinking. Just like humanity is not merely a form of education, thinking isn't the material activity but the consequence, it is a new beginning. And precisely because these three women longed for those beginnings, for the shelter of light they started to see with the eyes of humanity: "God full of mercy, who dwelleth on High, cause the soul which hath gone to its rest to find shelter under the wings of the spirit, among the souls of those and pure as the firmament of the skies, for they have offered charity for the memory of his soul; for the sake of of this, conceal him in the mystery of thy wings forever, and bind up his soul in the bond of life; may the Lord be his inheritance, and may he repose in his resting-place in peace"[21a]. Sometimes a vision can be heard only after terrible efforts. It is not a coin-machine for candies, and not even candies are there in store.

The paradox of our freedom is that all these things are possible, both the destruction and the creation; but the freedom itself is not a foundation; freedom alone can be followed only by the most terrible form of disappointment and discontent, it must be used in the same utilitarian way that one applies to thinking or to his own life, as a means for something. Freedom only opens an abyss. This is obviously not a denial of freedom but a warning! It is only a call for responsibility and judgement, and even when these things cannot be learnt from life so easily at times one needs to hear, just like when God promises through the prophet that he will bestow freedom to those who hear, and if they don't then the freedom will come by water and fire, written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur.

Once more we hear the words of Goodman-Thau: "Now it is only a matter of time. The breach is there already, soon it will become another time breach. Not simply a temporal breach, but a fresh demolishing of what I built over the years. Not because it is still standing but because it stands for something. Not for me, but for all those students of Hermann Cohen that are no longer there, for all those books that were never written, all those lectures that never took place. Conferences, symposia and colloquia, all those things cannot bring people back nor evoke the memory unless a living tradition is created by those who are living, created by those still surviving. Unless a voice out of the empty space and the silence rises to reach all those who were murdered, unless the lesson of Auschwitz is learnt so that it will not happen again... But it does happen again every day, every hour, right here, but now right before our eyes. "O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes and see not; which have ears and hear not". What is the point of all the books and all the speeches? But when they all plunge their ears, you up there do hear. Through the tears we shed together the waters above can encounter the waters below. We channel open-ended pathways again."[22]

It is no longer a question of theology, it is a question of responsibility. A certain German thinker spoke about Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas as "philosophical theologians of the world-responsibility". Tirelessly has Agnes Heller repeated that "curious as we are, we do not know when, how and where we are to arrive, or whether we will arrive at all; what we know for sure is that the next installment of history will be written by us"[23]. This is not a pessimistic warning, but rather a loving warning; if the technological imagination will write the next chapter of human history then even the beautiful will disappear and there will be no longer any good to choose from. Because Arendt did and Heller and Goodman-Thau do bear witness to what it means to be entirely human again their witness cannot be silenced by the books and the libraries and the prizes, their legacy is a living legacy, reason for which one often fails to see it so clearly from the books; it is not a solution but rather a realization, a difficult one. Gillian Rose said once "I've told you the tale, the Midrash is not beautiful, it is difficult"[24]. We're given choices and that's the secret of freedom's power to both annihilate and construct anew.

"This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live". [25]

Because Arendt, Heller and Goodman-Thau chose life they're women from dark times, they've paid their debt and as long as they lived in a conflict never resolved it can be said that they truly live to use the closing sentence of Stefan Zweig's autobiography. Arendt has her answers now perhaps, Heller and Goodman-Thau are still asking. asking about solitude and loneliness - the solitude of the thinker and the loneliness of oblivion; modernity enables both and it is our task to choose. This is not a celebration of the irrational, but of everything that is uniquely creative and vivifying in humanity. Can we perhaps leave the TV for a second and recognize ourselves in their radical madness? Elie Wiesel said once in a novel that Messiah will never come, but that we have to wait in any case because it is a little late; is it also a little late for us to be "hourly" as in the lines of Goethe? Only time has the answers, but for sure we are the ones to discover them with the risk that once we find them there might be no one left to live them on. Books are simple numbers of an ISBN system; can we start to believe that perhaps it is not freedom that will makes us free, but our actions, and that they need to be reconsidered once or twice? Are we able to live with all this? with Arendt, Heller and Goodman-Thau as companions?

Perhaps an ideal world like that promised by Stalinism and the Nazis and nowadays prompted by Islamic terror, could be an answer; but once the utopia would come boredom would settle in and mass suicide would become the rule.

In the last days of her life Hannah Arendt found prophetic inspiration for herself in the words of Cato, a Roman stateman: "I feel like a man nearing harbor after a long voyage; I seem to be catching sight of the land". I still house the fearful doubt that at the end of our lives we will feel having journeyed at all; I can only conclude with a poem written in 1975, the year of Arendt's death:

Perhaps someone has seen
The birth of radio and TV
The conquest of the moon and
The plastic heart, the electric too
And yet he doesn't know
Happiness, or Unhappiness
(Ugo Canonica, Switzerland)

[1] H. Arendt, "The Human Condition"

[2] Genesis 1:4-5
[3] Genesis 15:12-13
[4] H. Arendt, "Home to Roost", public speech 1975.
[5] Sentence used by Arendt referring to Martin Heidegger
[6] Exodus 10:21
[7] Isaiah 61:1
[8] Isaiah 42:16
[9] Joshua 9:9
[10] Genesis 22:6-8
[11] Genesis 1:27
[12] H. Arendt, Ph.D dissertation, "Der liebesbegriff bei Augustin"
[13] H. Arendt, "The Life of the Mind"
[14] H. Arendt, "Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy"
[15] J. Ring, "The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender & Judaism in the work of H. Arendt"
[16] Dror Yikra, zmira of Shabbat.
[17] H. Arendt, "Responsibility & Judgement". J. Kohn ed.
[18] A. Heller, interview with Csaba Polony, 1997
[19] E. Goodman-Thau, "In the Ark of Innocence", A. Akkermans trans.
[20] F. Kafka, The Octavo Notebook
[21] F. Kafka, Diaries
[21a] El Ma'ale Rachamim, Jewish prayer.
[22] E. Goodman-Thau, "In the Ark of Innocence", A. Akkermans trans.
[23] A. Heller, "Can Modernity Survive?"
[24] G. Rose, "Love's Work"
[25] Deuteronomy 30:19